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| Guatemala: Twitterer Released from Jail, Now Under House Arrest Posted: 15 May 2009 06:32 PM PDT Video Link (dialogue in Spanish). Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, the soft-spoken Guatemalan I.T. worker arrested for having "tweeted" a critical opinion about the assasination/bank corruption scandal that has shaken Guatemala this week, is released from jail. In the video above, his pals -- including a few who've checked in here on Boing Boing -- set up a laptop in the jail holding area right after he's "checked out of his hotel suite," as @jeanfer puts it, and he makes his first "freed" post to Twitter. Note that he is twittering while still handcuffed. He is now sentenced to house arrest. @jeanfer's employer put up a loan for the $6500 fine ordered by a Guatemalan judge. Supporters are collecting PayPal donations to repay it. (via Oscar Mota) Meanwhile, massive protests are planned this weekend in response to the assassination of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg, who blamed Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom for his own anticipated murder in a posthumously released YouTube video. In interviews today, Colom blamed powerful enemies for the scandal about claims he ordered Rosenberg's murder, as his administration cracks down on military abuses and drug gangs. Previously:
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| Posted: 15 May 2009 05:40 PM PDT  Irwin Chusid wrote to let me know that he has teamed up with Barbara Economon and Drew Friedman to begin offering Drew's art in the form of high quality prints. Drew is one of our favorite artists so this is great news! Look at this gorgeous rendition of Tiny Tim, the late ukulele player and respectable historian of early 20th century music. Launched in June 2009 by Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon in collaboration with the artist, DrewFriedman.net is the exclusive source of fine art prints featuring the works of the iconic illustrator. All prints are personally approved and hand-signed by the artist.Drew Friedman fine art prints |
| Posted: 15 May 2009 05:23 PM PDT  These commemorative Obama Shoes can be yours for just $39.99. They're "easily an $80 value," according to the TV commercial. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!) |
| "Here. My Explosion..." a tilt-shift feature film by Reid Gershbein Posted: 15 May 2009 05:07 PM PDT Reid Gershbein says: Thanks to you posting about my Tilt-Shift Flip video and the amazing response it got.Here. My Explosion... |
| "Get Excited and Make Things" shirt at Howies, Carnaby St. London Posted: 15 May 2009 05:02 PM PDT  Moleitau took this photo of a "Get Excited and Make Things" shirt at Howies, Carnaby St. London.
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| Posted: 15 May 2009 04:56 PM PDT  High voltage hackers ArcAttack of Austin, Texas, are known to BB readers for their Singing Tesla Coils that they use to perform music. For example, here, a pair of coils delight us with an, er, energized rendition of the Doctor Who theme. Sadly, it's unlikely that most of us will get a chance to try our hand at conducting this Tesla orchestra so ArcAttack has enhanced their Web site with a simple yet fantastically fun Tesla Coil Emulator. My first number was the familiar tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What song would you like to hear the coils sing? From the ArcAttack site: Tesla Coil Emulator Previously: |
| Street gang calling cards from the 1970s and 1980s Posted: 15 May 2009 04:42 PM PDT  Very Short List recommended this blog entry featuring Chicago street gang cards from the days of yore. The We Are Supervision blog has a wild collection of the business cards that Chicago’s gangs printed up in the seventies and eighties and used to make friends and intimidate people.The above card looks like one that Luther ("Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay"), warlord of The Rogues, would have had. |
| Vanity Fair illustrator Ed Sorel Posted: 15 May 2009 09:02 PM PDT  Vanity Fair has a gallery of Ed Sorel's illustrations of Dick Cheney and his unsavory ilk. No one is safe under the brush of Vanity Fair contributing artist Edward Sorel, whose watercolors expose the pathology of power and the fatuousness of fame. VF.com presents a gallery of Sorel’s rogues. Illustration above from “Inside Bush’s Bunker,” by Todd S. Purdum (October 2007). |
| Sony Pictures CEO: "Nothing good from the Internet, period." Posted: 15 May 2009 02:15 PM PDT Over on BBG, our Joel's spotted this visionary statement from one of our would-be masters of technology: "I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period."Quote: Sony Pictures CEO on the value of the internet |
| Mark on The Martha Stewart Show, May 18, 2009 Posted: 15 May 2009 02:17 PM PDT  (Photo: Anders Krusberg/The Martha Stewart Show) On Monday, May 18, I'll be on The Martha Stewart show. I'm going to demonstrate bunch of different projects from the pages of MAKE, and I'll also show Martha how to build a vibrobot. Martha is one of my heroes, so it was a thrill to be on her show! Above: Martha Stewart is enjoying a Maker-made cup of coffee. The coffee roaster on the left was designed by Larry Cotton and was featured in Make Vol 8. The hydraulic espresso tamper was designed and built by John Edgar Park and appears in Make Vol 12. And that's my espresso machine that I modded with a PID temperature control kit from espressoparts.com. MAKE Editor Mark Frauenfelder on The Martha Stewart Show this Monday |
| Architecture of evil: the lairs of games villains Posted: 15 May 2009 01:38 PM PDT Geoff sez, "Games critic Jim Rossignol, from Rock Paper Shotgun and This Gaming Life, has guest-posted on BLDGBLOG about the design of 'evil lairs' in contemporary videogames - from World of Warcraft to System Shock to Shadow of the Colossus. It's a great post, actually - asking what evil is and why we insist on representing it in certain ways, architecturally." Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds (Thanks, Geoff!) |
| Guatemala: Twitterevolution, "YouTube Sedition," and Deepening Political Crisis Posted: 15 May 2009 12:30 PM PDT  A quick recap of updates this morning on the political crisis in Guatemala follows. Previous posts linked at the bottom. * Yesterday, Guatemalan I.T. worker and Twitter user Jean Anleu (shown above / photo: Surizar) was raided by police, arrested, charged with inciting "financial panic," fined US $6500 (more than the average Guatemalan makes in a year), and sentenced to detention to be followed by house arrest. Supporters created a blog with information about his case, and are continuing what some describe as a "Twitterevolution" in Guatemala, using the hashtag #escandalogt and raising money by PayPal for his release. Anleu's case is the first of its kind in Central American history. * One of Jean Anleu's Twitter (and real-life) geek friends, "Manolo," says,Fundraising from abroad to secure his release is being received in my personal PayPal account (manolo@manoloweb.net) For people in Guatemala we have an accout of a Jean's relative G&T Bank, account # 39-4478-4 (Jhenny Gonzalez). We are going out to the courthouse in Guatemala City right now, since the family got a loan from Jean's employers for the rest of the required amount, so, we are planning to release him within hours. I'll keep Boing Boing updated on this. More here.UPDATE, May 15, 12pm PT: Manolo emails us: The good news is that @jeanfer is about to be free. He and his family now have to pay back the money, but he'll be released in a few hours. He was able to post a tweet from my PC before leaving for the detention center, where he has to do some paperwork and wait till tonight to be released.Below, @jeanfer's "freedom tweet," sent about an hour ago from @manolo's computer.
* Guatemalan photojournalist James Rodriguez has published a photo-essay documenting protests in Guatemala calling for president Álvaro Colom to resign in the wake of accusations he ordered the assastination of Rodrigo Rosenberg. * Street vendors are selling bootleg DVDs of Rosenberg's "death message" video (screengrab at left) which has spread virally on YouTube. One of these street vendors, shown below, has been arrested by the Guatemalan police. For the act of distributing bootlegged YouTube videos, this man, who also works as a "chicken bus" driver's assistant, has been charged with "inciting sedition, revolution, or overthrow of the state." Here's a PDF link.
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| Boing Boing Video: "To," an ambient animation by Bob Jaroc and Plaid Posted: 15 May 2009 12:34 PM PDT (Download MP4, or watch on YouTube) Today's Boing Boing Video episode is an ambient animated short by filmmaker Bob Jaroc and the band Plaid (Warp Records). Best enjoyed with stereophonic supersonic headphones, so you can appreciate the shift from one channel to another, while you watch thousands of starlings take flight in a burnt sunset sky. Bob Jaroc explains how this lovely, evocative avian work took form: They were real starlings, not digitally-generated. They were filmed over a few winters here in Brighton. I was lucky enough to have access to the then-abandoned and now destroyed West Pier, and got them down on tape as they were coming in to roost. I then extracted them from the background and edited them to the track, often going back and trying to capture a certain motion to go with a certain bit of audio. RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic) |
| Books about (or at least by) weird but interesting people Posted: 15 May 2009 09:24 AM PDT Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. I just raced through two novels - not because I had to finish them quickly, but because they moved so quickly. The first, by my best friend from college Walter Kirn, is an entertaining but (for me, anyway) nightmarish reminiscence on trying to make it through Princeton called Lost in the Meritocracy, based on this essay Kirn wrote for The Atlantic. Not the academics, but the culture itself. What self-conscious public school kids like Walter and me learned at Princeton was that there really super wealthy people who control a heck of a lot of the world, and that they have institutions like Princeton to help their kids find one another and then inherit their daddies' places. Yes, I know most of you already know that - but we didn't. It was a more innocent era, and these kind of things came as big, adolescent, crises of disillusionment that required ample self-medication. And Kirn's writing, if you haven't gotten to experience it before, is the most effortlessly engaging literary literature being written today. The second is a book by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the acclaimed Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, then went ahead and won a MacArthur genius grant which made the rest of us really jealous. It's hard to be too jealous, though, because Jonathan is a totally sweet guy and he actually is the sort of genius writer for whom such prizes were created. And, most of all, he used the time and money to create his first true work of genius, Chronic City, which - like Kirn's novel - deconstructs the hyper-competitive social landscape of eastern urbanites in a fair but viciously accurate near-future parody of manners and hermeneutics. |
| Posted: 15 May 2009 08:13 AM PDT  Recently on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol used the occasion of Eidos Montreal taking the reigns of the Thief franchise to take a deeper look back at the legacy of the game and the legacy of the people who made it, and the remarkably high bar Eidos will have to reach. We also looked at upcoming games: a nine minute walkthrough of BioShock 2, the coming storm of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima's next game, a next-gen Breakout-meets-shooter for PS3, the tiny planets and big chaos of Max Blastronaut, as well as more Noby Noby Boy culinary treats, and Rag Doll Kung Fu's PS3 remake gone free for a week. More artful things: what happens when you tear videogame code like modern artist Lucio Fontana slashed his canvases, 8-bit game iconography meets ancient Andean textile art, the sexiest Space Invaders psych-pop ever created, Metal Gear meets Mary Blair, and swimming in a low-bit pixel pool. And other odds and ends: a new Space In-vader shirt, a shirt to make you a Sackboy, a glitch-pop chiptune afterparty, Fable and Mario 64 in paper, and Super Smash Bros. meets Team Fortress 2. |
| Posted: 15 May 2009 09:14 AM PDT Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. Although I begged them (and they agreed at the time) to change their name from Personal Democracy Forum to Participatory Democracy Forum, the name remains the same. But the purpose remains the same, too, so I'm glad I got invited to participate in the Forum's conference again this year in New York City on June 29 and 30. The one thing that has changed, however, was my ability to negotiate a short-term discount of $100 for BoingBoing readers who want to go, by using the discount code "boingboingpdf". That's only going to work for the next 24 hours, but that's better than nothing. (They are pretty good about finding roles for interns, too, so try for that if the entry fee is still too high.) On the brightest side, this year's confirmed participants include Danah Boyd, Clay Shirky, Frank Rich, Dan Gillmor, Jack Dorsey, Dave Troy, Baratune Thurston, Ana Marie Cox, Vivek Kundra, Amanda Rose, Tara Hunt, Nate Silver, Craig Newmark, Gina Bianchini, Beth Noveck, Jeff Jarvis, Scott Simon, Michael Wesch, Joe Rospars, David Weinberger, and Mark Pesce. And unlike a lot of conferences, these folks actually participate in the whole thing. (Micah Sifry of PDF informs me that they tried to change the name to Participatory Democracy, but couldn't find an unused url for it.) |
| Posted: 15 May 2009 01:12 PM PDT  Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. The "Index of Freedom," maintained by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. By measuring across a wide variety of policies and activities, the study concluded that New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota are the most free, while my own New York is - by significant margin - the least (due in part, no doubt, to the famously draconian drug laws implemented during the Rockefeller era and still not repealed). (Then again, as we look at the Mercatus Center funding, another picture emerges.) |
| The Ygyssey: Pinkwater takes on The Odyssey Posted: 08 May 2009 07:53 AM PDT  Earlier this week, I reviewed Daniel Pinkwater's wonderful homage to the Illiad, the Neddiad, and now I've had the distinct pleasure of reading the sequel, The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There, a tribute to (what else?) The Odyssey. The Ygyssey picks up a few years after the world-shaking final battle that concludes Neddiad, and switches POVs to Yggdrasil Birnbaum ("Iggy" for short), the tomboyish female lead of the Neddiad, daughter of the famed cowboy Captain Buffalo Birnbaum, a retired silent film-star. Iggy discovers that the ghosts that habitually haunt the Hollywood residential hotel she lives in (along with Neddie and many of the other delightful Neddiad cast) are vanishing. Abandoning her semi-boyfriend (a bebop-obsessed thug who is the world's only hipster capable of drumming Beethoven symphonies), she recruits her friends for an adventure to the Underworld, where they seek to discover the mystery of the disappearing ghosts (first, though, they plan their adventure in a giant stucco theme-restaurant with "an indoor rainstorm every twenty minutes, you don't have to pay for your meal if you don't want to, and there are life-size dioramas of scenes from the life of Jesus in the basement"). Whereupon they contend with the normal Pinkwaterian array of society girl bullfighters, trained ducks named Lucifer, the ghosts of Ben Franklin, Jesse James, Eng and Chang, Lassie, John Philip Sousa (and others), fresh corn muffins, policemen shaped like giant Labrador retreivers, extreme urban free-climbing, allegorical twenty-first century New York City mayors, evil eel-sharks, hippies called Woovy Groovy, Wholewheatflower, Pop Daddy (and others), a shaman who reluctantly agrees to spoil the allegorical misery they undergo by telling them how to shake off a witch's curse ("You realize by accepting this easy expedient you're taking all the depth out of the whole story"), and talking bird Elvis impersonators (among others). In other words, this is your typical Pinkwater novel: screamingly funny, unbelievably weird, and fantastically awesome. |
| Us Now: documentary about web collaboration with Shirky, Tapscott Posted: 15 May 2009 05:17 AM PDT Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo. Matan sez, "We made a film about mass collaboration through the Web and how it is reshaping the future of government. "Us Now" features Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott and lots of other clever people. And we made it look pretty too! Better still, it's up for FREE online streaming!" |
| UK chiropractors try to silence critic with libel claim Posted: 15 May 2009 04:39 AM PDT Stef sez, The British Chiropractic Association is using the libel laws to try and silence Simon Singh's discussion of some of the more, uh, unusual claims they make for Chiropractic treatments (such as curing Colic and Asthma). They've sued Simon for libel for describing such claims as 'bogus', and in a preliminary hearing a judge has chosen a somewhat odd, harder to defend, definition of the word, even though Simon clarified his precise meaning in the very same article. Dave Gorman has a good summary, and there's a lot more detail at Jack of Kent." Two Things (Part B) (Thanks, Stef!) |
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